Orange County Health Department

Despite the fact that it has been clear for a long time that chikungunya would eventually reach the U.S., we have not been preparing in a meaningful way. In particular, we have not created a vaccine nor have we been trying very hard to do so. A vaccine for chikungunya would come from either government labs or the pharmaceutical industry. Government health research has been hampered for the last several decades due to funding cuts, and developing new vaccines is not viewed as sufficiently profitable by the shareholder-value driven pharmaceutical industry. As a result, we are about to be caught with our pants down.